“BIRTHING THE NEW VISION”
Oh, God,
how contrary
You chose
Mary
My feeble
attempt at a haiku brings forth the shock and irritation and astonishment of
the birth story of Jesus the Christ. The
heart of the Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke and John is that God has
come among us as a human being, as a baby nonetheless, dependent upon us to
nurture this vision of what has come to be known as the Incarnation. God chose as Her vehicle for revelation a
peasant girl, engaged to be married, rooted deeply in the system of
patriarchy. God asks Mary to become
pregnant without intercourse with males, and if she says “yes,” she will face
the death penalty, as a teenager pregnant before marriage. From the beginning, God is telling us that
this new vision will be different – it will be focused on the margins of life,
not the center of life.
Mary seems
to understand this too. After she says
“yes,” she announces the new vision in her “Magnificat,” indicating that in her
saying “yes,” and in Joseph’s saying “yes,” the vision will come anew. Her song of praise (found in Luke 1:46-55)
announces that in the Incarnation, God is continuing to do what She has been
doing: regarding those on the margins, scattering the proud and mighty, exalting
those on the bottom, feeding the hungry, sending the rich to the ash heaps of
the margins. In the birthing of this new
vision, Mary announces that the world is about to turn.
In the
Christmas season, we have so sentimentalized the whole story and glorified Mary
as a genderless holy woman, and in so doing we have missed the point of the
story. It is certainly about a woman on
the margins of life, devoted to God. It
is certainly about a woman wiling to put herself in harm’s way. Yet, it is mostly about the contrary nature
of God – She reveals Herself in unexpected and irritating ways. Birthing the new vision is a labor of love.
Mary brings
to mind Fannie Lou Hamer, who was born in 1917 as the youngest of 20 children
to a sharecropping family in Mississippi.
She began working in the fields at age 6 and dropped out of school at
age 12 to support her family. In
Sunflower County, Mississippi, about 80 miles from where I grew up in Arkansas,
she was married and working as a sharecropper in 1962 when the angel SNCC
appeared to her to ask her if she would allow a new vision of equity and
equality to be born in her. She had been
sterilized without her permission, but the angel got through to her
birth-giving spirit. She said “yes,” and
though she did not officially suffer the death penalty, she was arrested and
beaten because she began to register people to vote. Her song, which magnified the Lord, was
entitled “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Her vision gave birth to the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended (for the moment)
neo-slavery in the South. Like Mary’s
vision, her vision is still unfolding and has many ups and downs. Fannie Lou Hamer, the modern Mary, did not
receive the death penalty in one day, but she received it more slowly – her
deteriorating health because of her lack of adequate health care, finally took
her life at age 60 in 1977.
As we
gather around this Christmas story once more, let us not get lost or distracted
by the sentimentality that often belies this season. Let us not get diverted by the call of the
products to give us meaning. Let us
remember the contrariness of God in the visions that She gave to Mary of
Nazareth and to Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi. And let us try to find those visions. As we do, let us seek to be guided by a much
better poet than me, Howard Thurman, in his poem “The Work of Christmas:”
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the
lost,
To heal the
broken,
To feed the
hungry,
To release
the prisoner,
To rebuild
the nations,
To bring
peace among {siblings},
To make
music in the heart.
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